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Quick Menu Overview

Lesson 9 from: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV Fast Start

John Greengo

Quick Menu Overview

Lesson 9 from: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

9. Quick Menu Overview

The quick menu saves you from digging deep into the camera menu. The quick menu also creates easy touchscreen access to a number of different controls, including file format, how those images are saved to the SD and CF cards, and picture styles.

Lesson Info

Quick Menu Overview

Next up is our quick menu. This is a short cut menu to features that you might want to have quick access to straight on the back of the camera. So let's take a look at many of these. We're not going to talk very long about these because these are things that we have already talked about for the most part, but I can find this as a very handy feature if I ever have the camera mounted in a position where I can't see through the viewfinder or I can't see the top of the camera, say it's mounted up on a tripod that's quite tall, I can see those changes and I can make them in back even if you want to do it with touchscreen, you can do it with that. So all of those controls, we had buttons on the top of the camera or dials on the back of the camera. Now one that's kind of different is we do have a shortcut into the custom controls of the camera and we've been talking a little bit about this and just as a quick preview by going in here here are all the different buttons that you can customize i...

n some way on the camera and so my guess is that if you're a user of this camera and you've had it set up the way you like it and you swap it with another person who has the camera, you're not gonna figure out how things are working out, like how do you have this activated? What is this button doing? And so everyone's gonna want to tweak with these and so we're gonna go in and I'm going to give you a dozen of my favorite custom button setups for different types of scenarios. Picture styles is a way of developing our in camera Jpegs and so if you remember back in the days of film, we had Kodak film and Fuji film and Agfa film and lots of others that each had it's own look. You can go into picture styles and you can customize it the way that you want to work it yourself and we'll take a closer look at that in the full menu section as well. There's a white balance shift that I'm gonna hope and guess that most people will never use, it's if you want to adjust the white balance even differently throw everything off a little bit warmer or cooler or make some changes to all of the white balance settings at one time. The auto lighting optimizer, right, we will talk more about this, but I want to give you an example right here and now. This is only going to be in effect when you are shooting Jpegs. There are a number of features on this camera that I generally call image manipulation modes where the camera goes in takes your image and messes with it and it's only going to do that with Jpegs, it does not do it with a RAW image. What this does is it takes a look at the image and it tries to make sure that the highlights don't get blown out, but also in this image the shadows are a little bit dark and so if you enable this it's often going to lighten the shadows up a little bit and, I think, for a lot of people photography this works pretty good because we want to see the people and a lot of times they or their features are sometimes in the shadows and this will help in those situations, but with other types of photography, perhaps landscape photography, we want that more stark contrast, we want more darks, we want our brighter areas brighter, and so it's not something I would want to turn on all the time for all types of photography. Once again, more modes that we are basically replicating the buttons on the top of our camera. This just gives us a different way to access those and for anybody who is not able to focus up really close, that screen on the top can be very small. If you're over 40 and your vision is literally you need to have the camera a little bit further away, it can be easier to make those changes cause it's a much bigger screen on the back of the camera. Here we get to decide how we are recording images to which memory card. You can have it go to one specific memory card, you can choose the SD card or the CF card if you want and once it fills up it stops, it doesn't go to the other one. Auto switch is when one card fills up, it goes to the next card and you just choose which card you want to record to first and then the overflow goes into the next card. Recording separately is going to record the exact same, or excuse me, is going to record RAW's to one card and Jpegs to the other. So, for instance, you want to keep the RAW's yourself, but your client needs Jpegs right here, right now, you could just give them the card with all the Jpegs on it and you can reverse which card gets the RAW and which card gets the Jpeg as well and then a very popular one for people who are shooting on serious assignments is that you shoot duplicate images, one to one card and one to the other card and if you want to back up as you shoot, this is the safest option. That way if something was to happen, the card got lost, it got damaged, the file got corrupt, it's on the other card and so that's the safest way. It's a great thing to have and I think the memory card companies absolutely love this because now we buy cards in two packs so that we can get one for each slot because I was like that, I don't like to leave a slot empty, I want to have it in there as well. The cards have gotten so cheap with the sizes that they've gotten, I am generally recording to multiple cards most of the time now just because it's just a nice, safe protocol and I've never had a problem when having two cards recording at the same time. Little warning for you folks. Movies are only recorded to one card and so this can come as a bit of a surprise when you think you have it on both cards, you hand one card off to your client and they say, "there's no movies on here," and you can, if you want, record everything stills to both cards, you shoot movies they go to one card, you can go into the menu system, and you can copy things from one card to the other card, it just does not simultaneously write to both cards at the same time when it comes to movies, and that is all movies, not just 4K movies, HD, high frame rate, low res, all of them, they only go to one card, and it is the card of your choice. You can go in here and choose what is your primary card. You can choose how your images are recorded; RAW images, there's normal RAW, then a medium and smaller size if you don't need the resolution, and then a variety of Jpeg images as well, and in general the serious photographers are probably going to be shooting RAW. Some people are going to be shooting Jpeg because it fits their needs quite fine. In general, it goes with two philosophies. One, you should shoot the largest, highest quality image that you can get out of the camera, but if you know the final output and you know what you need, you're putting a picture on Ebay that's gonna be this big, you don't need to shoot a 30 megapixel RAW for that, you can shoot a small Jpeg and so if you know the output of what you need it's perfectly fine to set it for that particular need. It's hard when you don't know what the output's gonna be and you're like, this could be used in any way, in that case you want to set it to the highest resolution possible. And then finally, you'll see this little arrow down there and that's when you're using the touch screen so that you can just navigate back to the basic controls on the camera. So that's our quick menu and we're going to be able to go in and we're going to be able to customize this when we get into the custom quick controls so that the features that you want to control are here. The lock button, as I mentioned before, will lock a number of buttons and controls on the camera so if you accidentally bump that back dial or you hit the multi-controller with your nose cause you're left-eyed or you turn the main dial or you use the touch screen and you don't really like to do it, you can choose which one or all of these features are locked by flipping that switch over to the right. There might be some people that have a love hate relationship with the touch screen and they want it on, but then they want it off and you can just dial that into the locked off with the multi-function lock feature and you can have that feature activated when it's locked and so that way when the switch is over to the right the touch screen does not work, and when you flip the switch back the touch screen then works, and so it's a great feature to have. There's a little lamp back here that let's you know that the camera is writing images to the memory card. You probably don't want to turn the camera off. Most importantly don't take the memory card out of the camera while it's doing that, that'll probably cause a major problem with the images that it's writing to the card and so that just let's you know the camera is working. There is an ambient light receiver here which controls the brightness of the screen in the back of the camera and there's a little speaker there so that when you're playing back movies you can hear the sound that has been recorded on that video.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Canon 5D Mark IV Recommended Settings

Ratings and Reviews

r_peddle
 

John is such a fabulous educator. Well spoken, knowledgeable and he presents with such clarity and easy, it makes listening that much more enjoyable. I would highly recommend taking this class and any of his classes dealing with photography. HE simplifies the menu system and buttons on the camera in this course that would be painstakingly long if you tried it on your own. I have watched this video 2-3 times know and each time I go back, I learn a little more. Being able to drop into any of the main topics with easy, not having to watch and search for your desired info is so convenient. I will never buy another camera without checking to see if John has completed a review on it........I trust his opinion. Thanks John......I am a fan.

Ralph Somma
 

I was reluctant to purchase this course because I already have the Instruction Manual that came with the 5D Mark IV and am committed to reading it in it's entirely. Nevertheless, after watching a preview of the course, I decide to buy it so I could view it at my leisure, pause and rewind it as needed. I am so glad I did. John Greengo's teaching method is clear and concise. He presents the material in a way that makes it interesting and enjoyable to learn. His effective use of visuals and demonstrations makes understanding every important function of the 5D Mark IV a breeze. I look forward to implementing what I've learned, his recommendations and tweaking the camera's settings to suit my own needs and preferences. Now as I trudge through all 600+ pages of the manual, I'm confident I will more easily grasp the camera's 100+ settings and can always refer back to the course if necessary.

Teri
 

First I have to say that I wanted this camera before it was even released. I had taken some of John's fast start courses and I had some questions regarding this camera vs. the 5D mark III and 7D mark II that I was using at that time. I emailed John and got an "out of office/out on location response". I put it out of my mind assuming that when John Greengo was back in the office, he'd have hundreds of emails waiting and my little question would get lost in the shuffle. I was delighted to receive a response a few weeks later. I was even more delighted when he released this fast start course. I did end up buying the 5D mark IV (love it) and had a pretty good handle on using it. This class opened up some new doors in how to use all of the features and customize things to suit my needs. I can never recommend John's classes enough. He explains things in an easy yet technical way that is useful to both beginners and seasoned photographers!

Student Work

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